Monday, November 06, 2006

White Men With Short Hair

I suppose you expect me to talk, Goldfinger.No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.I agree with the other BB (we really must change my name) and Captain Cabernet. Nick's own site shows a photo of our humble watchee. Here's the Wikipedia entry on Timothy McVeigh and the one on David Copeland. Were the latter two trying to 'destroy our way of life'? One would think so. But did Nick advocate torture in 1995 after Oklamhoma? Or in 1999? There's a bomb in a gay pub (OK that won't convince the Sun) and the clock is ticking. Or there's a bomb in a truck under a government building (Daily Mail: tea drinking skivers blown to smithereens) and the clock ... You get the idea. But police hold a brown man and Nick is suddenly on the side of PC Nasty.

On the morning of 1 October, 2002, Wolfgang Daschner, deputy chief of police in Frankfurt-am-Main, gazed at Magnus Gaefgen, a law student and the prime suspect for the kidnapping of the 11-year-old son of a Rhineland banker. The policeman was certain he knew where the boy was, but Gaefgen refused to talk and had every reason to maintain his right to silence.Suppose that Jakob von Metzler was slowly starving in a cellar. It was in Gaefgen's interests to let him die and dispose of his body when he was sure the police were not watching him. Alive, the boy would be a prosecution witness. Dead, he would be the source of forensic evidence. If Gaefgen stayed quiet, he might get away with murder and the police knew it.Daschner considered his options and wrote a memo. Gaefgen should be tortured, he said. 'After being warned, he should be questioned again, under medical supervision, with the infliction of pain [no injuries].' The kidnappers of children aren't brave men and the mere threat of a beating caused Gaefgen to confess that he had murdered Jakob and hidden his body in plastic bags under a jetty.

I particularly like The kidnappers of children aren't brave men - what are they supposed to do? Laugh? and say, Le Chiffre, you'll die scratching my balls?Now, I think Nick is quite intelligent. So this is probably the best case he could find. You may take note that the threat of torture did not save the boy's life. It would be a different story if it had. Nick could have written the murderers of children aren't brave men and it would be no less true. I assume from this that Nick can't find an example where torture saved a single life.His Lordship was right. The moderation of British trade unionists drove Marx wild, but he never tried to persuade them to think again and start a revolution.Mr Karl Marx, a German denizen of Soho, Westminster, London, co-authored a pamphlet with his friend Mr Engels of Manchester, titled 'The Communist Manifesto', which is widely believed to persuade just that, your honour.I'm truly boggled by the number of Marxists who misread the old git. He didn't want a revolution after all; gosh they wasted their efforts. Lenin, you silly sod.But the most infuriating sentence is this:Because Germany has experienced the horrors of both fascism and communism, torture is a taboo, banned not only by laws, but by the constitution.Has Nick not noticed that torture was banned in the US - and long before fascism or communism? The US, and for that matter this country, has experienced persecution and we have our own taboos - and for reasons every child is taught. If [o]nly the English held firm could he explain the method of extracting the confession of Guy Fawkes?For the first time in British history, there are asylum seekers who could attack the country which gave them sanctuary.Guy Fawkes, Nick. But what's the difference between asylum seekers and citizens? Why should Lord Haw-Haw or Melanie Phillips be treated differently?BTW, what do you propose to do if their governments will not so promise, or if in the case of some - Libya, for example, or Jordan, I can't believe a thing she says - we don't trust them? Anyway, shouldn't we apply the reverse logic? If their countries promise not to torture them, we know they're the bad guys. How did Libya treat the Lockerbie suspects? or the murderer of WPC Yvonne Fletcher? Nick knows that Saudi Arabia is a racist, sexist fascist hell. 14 of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis. If they won't torture suspects, surely that confirms that they're agents.Shuggy, my colleague on the Sharpener, posts on Drink-Soaked Trots for War site, also disquieted by Nick, though he says Many of the responses already in accuse Cohen of advocating torture, which he doesn't. Well, if Nick doesn't, why does he mention it in his opening paragraphs? What does Nick advocate? He certainly seems to advocate something other than the universal human rights he was so keen on until recently: now he thinks one law for John Bull, a different law for asylum seeking chancers.Nick likes to think he's George Orwell. Imagine him writing in the 1930s: SwissAsylum seeker in bomb plot. Swiss National, Albert Einstein, who has found sanctury in Princeton University today wrote to President Truman outling a truly outlandish bomb which he says could be placed in a port by boat. Nick Cohen questions whether this self described agnostic really is a Jew and persecuted by the Nazis as he claims. His device could be used by people who hate us just as easily as it could be dropped by high altitude bombers on Japanese cities. I consulted the Observer astrologer on details of this device, and he claimed he couldn't make head or tail of it. Send this man back now.

6 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Fallhammer sez:

I agree with the previous but one post's respondents. Nick has put on the black helmet with the heavy-breathing device and is no longer worth watching.

Maybe you chaps could poke sticks at Polly Toynbee, who's just written an article effectively saying that people who worry about surveillance are nutters and we should have ID cards? It's a classic in the genre of good liberal columnists scampering to keep up with Nulab policy.

Nick may be correct that Marx didn't try to persuade the English trade unionists to start a revolution. But this was pretty clearly because he thought that they weren't ready for it. But for his point to work he needs it to be the case that an Imam who expressed himself in correspondence in the way that Marx did wouldn't get considered a suspect by MI5:

Here's Marx writing to Engels on 27 July 1866:

The government has almost caused a mutiny here. Your Englishman first needs a revolutionary education, of course, for which two weeks would suffice if Sir Richard Mayne had absolute powers of command. In actual fact, it all hung on one point. If the railings had been used — and it almost came to that — for offence and defence against the police, and some score of the latter killed, the military would have had to ‘step in’, instead of merely parading. And then things would have got quite jolly. This much is certain: that these stiff-necked John Bulls, whose sconces appear made to measure for the constables’ bludgeons will accomplish nothing without a really bloody clash with those in power.

Surely KM was exactly and precisely the "spiritual leader" of the Anarchist terrorists who invented more or less the whole playbook in the 19th century? Or if not, he could certainly have been portrayed as one by the Paul Berman of the time

Marx also supported the Irish cause aswell, including its organisations such as the Fenian Brotherhood which planted bombs – although KM was critical of particular bombs, IIRC he referred to the one in Clerkenwell, then a workers district, as being particulalry stupid. But neither him or Engels were backward on the role of violence and the necessity of revolution. They also both resided in England when they set up and tried building the First International, which was in favour of revolution. I was throwing out an old book the other day, diaries of the Shah's last ambassador to the UK. In it, the soft labour MP Ennals does verbal somersaults on why he opposes torture in principle but could understand why the Shah needed to do it. Same old, same old...

Cohen's column in the Observer on October 24, 2004 took a very different line:"Their allegation goes way beyond the charge that the security services followed up leads from brutal foreign agencies. It suggests that people are being held indefinitely in British jails because a naked man beset by dogs named him to placate his tormentors.

So what, snapped the Court of Appeal. There is no other way, blubbed Lord Falconer.